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About On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions

Global forces are eroding the ability of states to exert sovereign control over their populations, territories, and borders. Yet when dominated subjects across the world dream of freedom, they continue to conceive of it in sovereign terms. Sovereign freedom haunts the imagination of oppressed ethnic minorities, popular masses ruled by foreign powers or homegrown tyrants, indigenous peoples, and individuals chafing under customary or governmental restrictions.

On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions draws on political theory and on two case studies – the encounter between Anglo-American settlers and Native American tribes, and the search for Jewish sovereignty in Palestine – to probe the allure of the idea of sovereign freedom and its self-defeating logic. It concludes by shifting its sights from political to economic sovereign power and by pursuing intimations of non-sovereign freedom in the contemporary age.

Reviews

“Joan Cocks is the best writer working today in political theory. This book, striking evidence of a heartful mind, charts the abundant human costs of casting sovereignty as freedom and calls instead for a turn to 'natural freedom' – the freedom to 'indulge in all the sensory delights to be had in the physical world around us, including the delights of meeting natural life forms that are entrancing because they are neither like us nor for us.' This is a brilliant, inspiring work that I read with pleasure in one sitting.” – Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor, Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science, Brown University, USA, and author of Antigone, Interrupted and Emergency Politics.

“Reflecting on the twentieth century, you may have suspected that freedom through sovereignty was a snare and delusion. If so, this is the book that will 'nail' it for you. Joan Cocks gives us a lucid, original, and carefully argued demonstration of how the quest for sovereign freedom in the United States and Israel entailed, necessarily, the dispossession and erasure of other life worlds and cultural identities. This is political history and philosophy at its most convincing.” – James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University, USA

“In the best tradition of political thinking and engagement, this book is a deep meditation on the concept of sovereignty. It helps us understand why this concept and the actions that follow from it need to be jettisoned. With sustained moral seriousness, it shows how the idea of mastering peoples and places is now a fantasy with dire implications for human beings and for the earth.” – Uday S. Mehta, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, City University of New York, USA, and author of Liberalism and Empire